Meeting day check in

When I last posted I was about to be working diligently to get the binding done my queen sized Cheese and Crackers quilt since I had entered it in a quilt show. You can see that Skyler insisted on testing it out as I worked. He had briefly tried the front some months back but this was new territory. I had even left the room for a time and came back to find him burrowed UNDER it as well, LOL. I felt I should pass on the trip with the girls to the quilt show at the museum this past Friday as I felt I needed to keep plugging in under to finish in time for today's pickup. I am P-O-K-E-Y when it comes to binding. Slow, slow, slow and it can takes me 3-4 days for a full/queen. In spite of Skyler's best efforts, I got the binding completed by Saturday morning.

The application of the sleeves was done by Sunday afternoon. At one point I had started using a smallish applique stitch and then thought "why?" I am not planning on keeping them on the quilt for long anyway so why not a running stitch? Thing went much more quickly after that decision was made. That left some time to pick out the small area near one corner of the quilt that had some tension issues and re-quilt that. Now I won't worry about the quilting pulling out.

I thought you might like to see a couple of the quilts that have been turned in recently by the Bama Belles. This fun quilt at left is from Jane. She used a bright pink bee fabric for the borders but the focus print of this Naptime quilt is a butterfly fabric. You just know that a little girl is going to love this one!

This cool batik rails quilt was done by Aline. I love how she combined them in color groupings of 4. Adds a little interest to a simple block. I think it could go for either sex, don't you?

My car was loaded up with quilts in pillow cases so even though I wanted to sew on my Strip Twist quilt this week I did not feel like lugging my Brother with me to work on it at the meeting. What to do instead? I don't want to start a project on one machine and not see it thru on the same one, after all. I toyed with the idea of working on my triple rails as it is an ongoing project with blocks leftover from a couple of previous tops but that wasn't really tripping my trigger.

Since my scrappy bargello is off the bed and a show entry I had put my old favorite bowtie quilt back on the bed. It is lightweight, yellow background and just so darned cheerful with 40's-50's prints. I love that thing and I love making bowtie blocks, particularly 3-D bowtie blocks. Good for scraps, unisex appeal for the kids and I haven't made any for awhile. That's what I wanted to do!

But first, I needed to cut through the scraps in my basket to get some more 3 1/2 inch squares to add to the mix. The fabrics were up to the top of the basket rim when I started this morning at the meeting. There has been time when it is up to the handle but I don't want my scraps getting out of hand. Been there and done that and don't want to cut for days on end again! (I'll help you though, Mom! LOL) This is how it ended up when I left at 2:30. Some 1 1/2, 2, 2 1/2, 3 inch strips. 2.5, 3 and of course the 3 1/2 inch squares. The strips to the left are for rails and the Grandmother's Scrap Bag I will do at some point. ( The only thing I didn't cut was the 30's repros leftover from the Cheese and Crackers. I put those with the rest of the like fabric. )

There is so much of that gold tone on tone that I dearly love that I decided to use that for the background fabric on the bowties rather than my usual muslin. In that basket were some of the bright leftovers from my Twisted Sister quilts--one of them is shown HERE. When I got home, I dug through the 3 1/2 inch strips and pulled the ones that I thought would contrast with that gold and whacked those up after we finished our evening meal. I also pulled all the other 3 1/2 inch squares and put the whole bunch in a small shoe box sized container. That puppy is full to the brim but ready for the next meeting and some time with the Jem. I love it when a plan comes together!

I came home with 4 more pinned quilts, one of them is my 2nd Jungle Snuggle Up shown HERE. The others belong to Linda C but I quilt her donation quilts till she learns how to use that Gracie set up she just got used from a quilting friend. That brings my quilt stack total up to 8. The girls keep asking if I have any binding for them to do so one of these days the answer will be "yes, I do". Next week, I am thinking. There were enough hands on deck at the pinning table that I only needed to help do my own so I kept cutting with some time out to seam two backs. The Jem came in with me for that.

Quilt related goals for the week---

• press and wind the binding for the FAB friendship quilt and mark it once the stencil I ordered comes in
• more Strip Twist blocks provided we don't have any more thunder boomers like yesterday
• two quilt shows either Friday afternoon or Saturday--leaning towards Saturday at this point
• recover the pressing board when the iron quick silver cloth arrives
  

That should be enough to keep me out of mischief, don't you think?